Almost 17 percent of the outstanding past-due balance of student loans is held by those over 50

A report released Wednesday by Barclays notes that 15.5 percent of outstanding student loan debt is owed by people 50 and older, including 4.2 percent held by people 60 and older. Those are staggering amounts given that outstanding student loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion, exceeding the amounts owed on credit cards and auto loans.

The older borrowers also account for a larger share of the past-due balance outstanding, with those older than 50 responsible for 16.9 percent of the past-due balance, Barclays analyst Cooper Howes said in the report.

The average student debt burden for borrowers older than 60 is $18,250.

Most student loans have a 10-year repayment plan, Howes said, but debt owed by older Americans hasn't been paid on that traditional schedule.

Moreover, "there is little reason to think that someone in retirement will suddenly attain the means or motivation to make on-time payments after having gone years without making them," he said in his report.

Chicago resident Charles Pedersen, 52, said he has student loan debt of $37,000 based on a loan that was originally $7,500. The 1985 college graduate said initially he figured he'd pay it off at some point. The next thing Pedersen knew, more than 20 years had passed, and interest had snowballed.

"I cannot and will not pay that amount of interest," said Pedersen, who added he has written to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asking Congress to look for ways to eliminate most if not all of the interest.

"I would gladly repay the loan" with some interest, said Pedersen, who added that money is tight because he works in the music business. He said he has no health insurance or retirement savings. Although he said he has been contacted by bill collectors, he said he still has a good credit score and credit cards.

"I will be working 'til I die," Pedersen wrote to Durbin. "This is not the American dream."

Stories similar to Pedersen's prompted Denise Smith, 52, of the Phoenix area, to start a Facebook group, "Aging With Student Debt." Smith began seeing growing activity on ForgiveStudentLoanDebt.com, the website for a grass-roots movement started in 2009 to raise awareness of higher education financing, but noticed that "the voices were mostly younger."

"I thought, 'Does nobody understand that people our age are still dealing with this debt?'" Smith said. "(The younger people are) going to be in the same boat I'm in if this doesn't get fixed. I see my age group as the writing on the wall."

Smith said she has a master's degree in clinical psychology and a current student loan debt of $104,000. Told of the Barclays report that people 60 years old and up have an average student loan debt of $18,250, Smith said, "I always wonder where they get those numbers because the folks I talk to are easily at double that amount."

Defaults on student loans probably will be a fiscal drag on the U.S. government, which accounts for about 90 percent of the student loan market, Howes said. He believes default rates will rise.

Barclays said the growth has been driven mostly by an increase in the number of borrowers who owe money on student-loan debt, and less by a rise in per capita debt. For example, from 2002 to 2010, the level of outstanding student loans rose by 174 percent, though average debt per borrower increased by 13 percent.

Despite the surge in student debt and the potential problems it might create, student loans are not expected to pose the same threat to financial markets as other types of credit.

"If defaults skyrocket, the burden of dealing with any problems that arise from student loans will fall on the federal government," Howes said.

The age data used in the Barclays report came from a Federal Reserve Bank of New York report.

Barclays' Howes said in an interview that it's not clear how the Fed classified private borrowers with co-signers in its study but said that a co-signer is not required to obtain a federal loan.

"It is likely that some of the loans held by older borrowers are government PLUS loans, which are taken out by parents on behalf of their children, as opposed to private loans taken out by the students with the addition of a parent co-signer," Howes said. But "these account for a relatively small portion of the federal loan programs, and in our view neither the PLUS program nor private loans with co-signers is large enough relative to other types of student loans to substantially alter the conclusion that older borrowers hold a significant portion of student debt."

A spokesman for the New York Fed said the authors of the study don't have data on how large a portion of the loans might be traced to parents having co-signed their children's loans.